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Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Larger suggestions/Show navbox templates on mobile

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Show navbox templates on mobile

  • Problem: When I use the mobile version I can't see the navigation templates, such as en:Template:Theatres in London.
  • Proposed solution: Show a compact version of navigation templates on mobile pages.
  • Who would benefit: It would make it easier to reach other pages, in particular when someone is not sure about the title of the page.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T124168
  • Proposer: Esc0fans (talk) 06:50, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • The blockers for this are well understood. 1. Navboxes are too large. they are very verbose and are huge contributors to pagesize. This is a solvable problem with lazy loading, but that does require significant engineering. 2. Navboxes are tables that don't work nicely on mobile devices, the UI concept needs work 3. Navboxes are mostly used by editors, not by readers (so lots of burden to benefit just a few). I would however love to see the design department simply EXPLORE this topic, come up with interaction ideas for people with this content. We really need a vision for this stuff, not just someone to flip a toggle and make these things visible on mobile. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:17, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • TheDJ, Please clarify lazy loading, Does it mean only loading when actually needed, like if you click on expand? Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 08:44, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Yes it means only downloading the content after engaging with some part of the UI to indicate you want the content. (not like expand now, because that shows you something that was already downloaded). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:09, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      Most navboxes are text-only. The larger ones with more complex styles might be a few dozen KB large but I doubt they would be as large as a single image, in term of data needed to be transfer. If those few KBs are of concern then I think a check box for user to opt out of such feature would already be sufficient. C933103 (talk) 08:00, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      The Covid 19 navboxes were 2MB at some point. On most covid pages, they were half the page load and for some smaller articles the covid navboxes were more bytes than the entire article. Of course that is a pretty extreme example, but navboxes are much larger than ppl think (because they are collapsed ppl don't really think about them). Regardless, MediaWiki has to take extreme cases as the default. If it can happen, it will happen, because its user generate content. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:08, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I think many readers also use navbox. Like even when I am not in a mode or mood of editing Wikipedia, I would still frequently use the navbox to check out what are some other related pages or topics that could contain information I might want to see or need to find. This definitely benefit readers. And I think a simple table is enough, as long as the table can be allowed to scroll horizontally. C933103 (talk) 22:41, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I fully support adding navboxes on mobile web and apps. They are an important part of Wikipedia and the reading experience is impoverished without them. Do you have any empirical evidence, like from usage studies, for the claim that "Navboxes are mostly used by editors, not by readers"? It seems highly dubious to me. --Albany NY (talk) 04:49, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    If we want to talk about dubious, that navboxes are used at all by any significant proportion of anyone is dubious. :) --Izno (talk) 06:12, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
All I know is that I use them frequently and find them a helpful way to learn about a topic. But I don't think it's wise for any of us to make claims about how people in general use Wikipedia without evidence from usage studies. --Albany NY (talk) 19:44, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
There definitely are some studies on this, I've seen them at Wikimania in the past. But finding them back is really hard. the search terms are so common... If anyone can find them, I'd love it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:23, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • phab:T124168 goes into all the detail, but in short: there are many concerns about blanket-enabling all navboxes on mobile. They can potentially contains enormous amounts of markup and visually consume a lot of space, which is problematic for mobile users. This is proposal is certainly out of scope for the Community Tech team, but we know it's a long-desired feature for some, so we will move it to our Larger suggestions category so it can be discussed further with the community. Thanks for participating in the survey, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 23:54, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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